


a complete picture

by 21tales



Category: Naruto
Genre: F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Character Death, sarada is a sakukarin child fight me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-25
Updated: 2018-11-25
Packaged: 2019-08-29 05:25:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16737949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/21tales/pseuds/21tales
Summary: two families, two drawings.for sakukarin week day 5: family/comfort





	a complete picture

**Author's Note:**

> my submission for the sk week!! i hope you like it!

Karin is five and she’s crouched down on the floor, scribbling with great concentration on the piece of paper laid out in front of paper. Different colours dot the skin of her hands, all through her arms to her shoulders. Her mother is kneeling next to her, peering over her art. There’s a certain exhaustion in her eyes that the girl cannot recognise, but she smiles every time Karin looks up at her. She smells of lilies. Her father is in the other room, humming some song she doesn’t know. It’s faint, but loud enough to drown out the voices outside.

The girl takes great care with the pencil, colouring with a bright red colour over the heads of the three figures in her drawing. 

She sits back and picks up the paper, facing it towards her mother. “How does it look?” Her excited eyes search for the same excitement in her mother’s.

“It’s lovely, flower,” she says, the smile growing wider as she pats the top of Karin’s head. “It looks wonderful.”

“Look, we’re so happy here!” Karin chirps, bringing the paper down. “You, me, Papa. Now I just have to draw our house in the back. Will that look nice?”

Her mother nods. “Yes. Yes, that would be nice.”

Karin turns back to her box of colours, digging through the pencils to look for something to match the colour of their small home. She picks up the brown and draws a long line behind the smallest figure of the three, when suddenly a loud crash is heard from the front door.

She hears her mother gasp and looks up, startled. The pencil drops from her hand, leaving a stray mark on the paper.

“Ma...?”

Everything happens so fast that Karin can’t quite grasp what follows in the next few moments. Her mother pulls on her arm firmly and brings her small body to her. Karin cannot see what’s happening, her face buried in her mother’s cold embrace. She hears her father yelling outside, things she cannot understand. Her mother is trembling and so is she. Everything is suddenly very loud, and very scary.  She tries to speak out, but all that comes out is a sob. There’s now a lot of bad people in their small home, and it makes her cry.

Somebody pulls her away from her mother harshly, and she screams, trying to reach out to her. She falls on the floor, looking up at the sharp weapons pointing down at her and her mother. Her hand lands on something else instead—her drawing. Her vision still blurred with tears, she tries to pull the paper towards her. Over all the screams and shouts and the bright red colour dominating her sight, she tries to bring the piece of paper to her, but somebody is stepping on it.

The paper rips.

* * *

Her daughter, now five, is crouched down on the floor over the piece of paper that she’s drawing on. She takes great care in colouring the red hair belonging to one of the three figures in the picture. Karin watches her with great interest from the couch as the girl fills the blank page with colours. Her wife is beside her, knitting a red scarf. She smells of cherry blossoms. A daily soap is playing on the TV in the background, drowning out the sound of the rain.

“How is it, Mama?” 

The paper is brought to Karin’s complete view and she studies it for a while. A child with dark hair, holding hands with a pink-haired and a red-haired woman. They’re standing in front of a house, with no other noticeable features on their faces except their big smiles.

Something reaches out to Karin from the depths of her memories. It’s a bitter sweet feeling but she somehow swallows it, smiling as she takes the paper from her daughter, taking the image in. She’s silent for quite some time, not understanding the feelings that this drawing brings to her. 

After some time, Sakura shifts beside her, putting down the wool and leaning over to take a look at the drawing herself. “It’s lovely,” she says and lightly places her hand on Karin’s knee. “Right, honey?”

Karin looks at Sakura and then back at the paper. The strange emotions are immediately replaced by a warmer feeling as she looks at the family in the picture. The bright colours, the untidy way the lines were drawn by those small hands...Karin smiles.

She looks at Sarada, who scrunches her nose and pushes her glasses up, eyeing her mother expectantly. 

“It’s...beautiful,” Karin finally says, her voice heavier than usual. Her daughter grins in response. “It’s so beautiful.”


End file.
